Dev Blog: 'Command The Colossal' Combat Balance

Greetings! I’m Matt Witter, a senior designer at Six Foot. I wanted to introduce myself, share a few upcoming balance changes and give everyone a bit of insight into how we approach combat balance within Dreadnought.

Combat balancing is best accomplished by making data-driven decisions, then implementing those decisions in a clean, methodical way. You don’t want to approach it haphazardly—like a bull in a fine china shop. This can create an unbalanced system with long-lasting negative effects on a game’s balance, economy and progression. For Dreadnought’s combat, our goal is to have a system that offers counterplay (where one strategy can effectively counter another) and makes sure that no one strategy becomes the “winning” strategy. This can be a fine line to walk as we strive to offer a range of ship loadout options and minimize the chance that you’ll make a bad loadout choice.

Any change to the combat system takes a variety of data and factors into account. For example, take officer briefings. Issues are generally discovered via our QA team, in our internal playtests or by our amazing community. We start by collecting data on the officer briefing to identify problems. Is it too strong? Too weak? Does it encourage a negative playstyle? Some data points that we collect about an officer briefing might include how many players use it, what modules it’s used with, and the average win rate and score of players who use it (to name a few). From there, we can begin to determine if the officer briefing is balanced—or if it needs more work.

Now for a more specific example: the “heal ball.” We dubbed this strategy after noticing that it was possible to use a combination of modules and officer briefings to create endless health and energy regen. After diving into our data, we discovered that a core piece of this problem stemmed from an officer briefing called Adrenaline Shot. In combination with other healing modules, Adrenaline Shot could make tactical cruisers extremely hard to defeat. To stay competitive, a player on the receiving end of an opponent’s heal ball had no choice but to create their own. Our goal in this situation was not to prevent the heal ball strategy, but to reduce its effectiveness—and ensure that other strategies could adequately counter it.

This brings me to some of the changes that you’ll see very soon. After looking at Adrenaline Shot, we sat down and discussed other officer briefings, how balanced they were as well as the roles we wanted them to play. The first thing we found was that some officer briefings had values that varied across ships. One example is Desperate Measures. We noticed that some ships activated this officer briefing at 50% remaining health, while others saw it activate all the way down at 12%. With the Command the Colossal update, this officer briefing will fire at 25% for all ships. We look forward to bringing similar changes to Survival Instinct, Get My Good Side and Nerves of Steel.

We also found a few officer briefings that did not create the intended gameplay experience. Tip the Scales is a prime example. Our data indicated that players rarely used this briefing, which we realized didn’t complement any ship loadout in a meaningful way—so we’ve added Last Resort in its place. Last Resort will activate when your ship reaches 0 energy. While active, you’ll receive a 15% reduced reload time and a 10% boost to your rate of fire. However, these bonuses go away once you gain 1 point of energy. Overall, we think this change will encourage a more tactical playstyle, and in combination with other briefings and modules, it will present an interesting option when building your ship loadouts.

As you might expect, we’re very excited as we progress toward Steam. We have a lot in the works for Dreadnought that we’ll discuss down the road, like better defining the roles of individual ships by adjusting their movement and weapon properties. Several of the weapon ranges have been adjusted with the Command the Colossal update. This is a small design step in our larger plan that will be rolling out across several updates. Our goal is to *further* define roles and play styles *offered by your ship selection* As you increase in tier these play styles and roles will be more critical to your success on the battlefield.

There are plenty of balance changes coming to the game with our launch on Steam, and we hope that you’re as excited as we are. Our team is always listening, and we cannot wait to get your feedback once the game is live.

Until next time!